Bitcoin Forum

So Noagendamarket said you were working on an advertising clearinghouse like projectwonderul and google's adsword.

How is it going?

This is coming along. One of the developers is currently moving house so that slows things down temporarily.

Why is this taking so long?

I would tell you but you wouldn't believe it. They are also not "my team" . I am  trying to push through the project the best I can but sometimes life gets in the way.

Progress report?

Dead in the water?  ???

Im planning on offering a bounty to get this done. Nothing else seems to be working.


If someone can do a clone of http://www.projectwonderful.com/adsearch.php (http://www.projectwonderful.com/adsearch.php) I am offering $350 for the job. Payment is on completion. Add this to the thread title Kiba.

Shouldn't the bounty be in bitcoin?

Yes whatever the equivalent value is in bitcoin when the time comes to collect the bounty.

Thanks to whoever it was who moved the thread.

Isn't bitcoinmedia.com mentioned in your signature what you want?

Well I'm going to give this a try. Just to see how far I get with this (more bounty might increase my motivation ;) ).

Let us know what progress you're making?

Sure, was already planning to do that. I've never used project wonderful, so some things might be a little different (and not have all the stats, etc. in the beginning).

Here is the first update:
- Designed the databases to store the publishers (people who have websites where they want to have ads shown on) and the websites (publishers can have multiple websites).
- Moved some existing code of an earlier (temp. abandoned)  project around and modified that registration page.

<edit>
Update for things I just did:
- New database where Publishers can link keywords to their website(s) (no web connection atm.).
- Restructured some ugly code, looks much better now.
- Account screen for publishers allows now update of email address, bitcoin address and password.
</edit>

Follow Hippich's example of not registering but spending money on advertisement?

You also don't need an account to register and publish ads, in my opinion.

I'm more thinking on a Project Wonderful type of implementation, with bidding on sites, etc. Also, later, I want to include stats of how effective the advertisement is/was for advertisers. And publishers might want to have some control about what type of ads are displayed on their site.

I don't see how you could do this without accounts. Other ways of implementing might do without accounts, but then it will look a lot different, with less possibilities.

noagendamarket and others, any comment on this?

Kiba, rethinking about what you said... something starts boiling in my head... maybe I can do both.

Give me some time to think about it, how to implement it.

<edit>
Would need some kind of moderation though, else people might send "offensive stuff" or other crap through the advertising system.
It would cost them btc, but still. That might harm the advertising system.
</edit>

Let the publisher approve banners.

It should be up to the site owner what they allow.

Publishers are owners of their site, presumably.

yes, but to keep track of approves you need some sort of account system.

I've been thinking about how to implement a semi-account-less system and started working on it.

Most db's are in place, initial code for submitting and updating info to the ads database is in place.

The advertiser will go to a website, uploads his ad and an url to link to and gets a bitcoin address.
Then he has 1 day to transfer the bitcoins to that address and the ad becomes active until all bitcoins
are used up. Then the ad is removed.

For the publisher it will be going to look something like this (the line he needs to add to his site to display the ads):


somesite.com is the domain where the "Advertising Clearinghouse" will be placed.

bitcoin_address will be the address of the site owner/publisher, where the earned bitcoins are send to. For every view of the ad the publisher gets some bitcoins. If the visitor clicks on the link, the publisher gets even more bitcoins. I know that this is sensitive for click fraud, but the only place to target that is in the script itself.

The publisher will be able to register his address through the script, to have some control over the ads displayed with that address (the control needs to be done on the clearinghouse website).

So, how the advertisers are going to bid, semi-accountless?

Not. I thought you didn't bother about that with the account-less system.

<edit>
To clarify a bit:

For bidding to work you need to track the actions of the bidder and you want that
the bidder is always the person who submitted the advertisement, so you need an
account for that. If you have idea's how to implement that without accounts, I would
love to hear your idea.

Let me know what you want, because I seem to be guessing every time what to do next
and if I'm doing it right. Last thing that I want is wasting time on things that nobody wants.
</edit>

Offer him some kind of code to access his bidding page. Though I think you have to make sure the traffic is encrypted lest you get people eavesdropped on ad.

Encryption (SSL/TLS) works on a different level, that's relative easy to setup.

The "kind of code" you mention would boil down to create an accounting system.
I think I'll continue with my initial code (and maybe put something like openID in later),
that's more straight forward to code.

If you have the basic system going, I suggest you to launch it as soon as possible.

Sure ;) , just that I'm a person with little free time (doing a PhD takes up a lot of time).  :(
Almost weekend again, so then I can spend some time on it again.

Any progress lately?

Is this being built off an already available platform like openx or Oasis (http://oasis.sourceforge.net/), or is this a 'from scratch' proposition?

Building from scratch.

Publishers can now register their websites. Next part will be working on the advertisers side. Next week I have holiday, so this might give me a bit more time to work on this.

Update?

Sorry, not yet. Have been busy buying a Christmas tree yesterday. ;)

So, any work lately?

Nope, busy IRL (work) and got some other thing to work on (although I could use the knowledge that it generated for the advertisement clearinghouse). Now weekend (and holiday), so I will be able to spend some time on this next few days.

Weekend update, please?

Worked on the advertiser side today (currently I'm busy with the Ad uploading). Databases are in place (although I might have to make some modifications on them later). Spend some time on the payment script (payment will initially go through MyBitcoin, later I plan to add MtGox as payment processor).

So anything after that, Biomike?

Ad uploading is working now (currently you can upload 4 different sizes of ads (square, button, banner and skyscraper), the script checks the type and dimensions of the image and rejects if they are not the right size, I used the same sizes as Project Wonderful uses), started already on the scripts to place bids. The forms for that are already in place, but no code yet to process the data.

I leave currently a lot of possible functionality out to get this released asap (still, a lot needs to be done). After release I have to go back to some parts of the code to extend it more.

For the ad upload I currently don't accept images not larger than 100KB. Is this sufficient for most people? Or should I make it even smaller/larger? (Kiba, both your banner and square bitcoin ad, that I used for testing, are smaller than 10KB)

I suggest to make it smaller, e.g. 40kB. An ad is going to be served thousands of times each day. It's worth a little effort to make the ad load fast.

I'm not saying this for the sake "of the internet"; I'm saying it for the sake of the service. Owners of websites don't like ad services that make their website seem slow.

True, that was also, partially, my point. But I have no reference of what is a reasonable size. That's why I'm asking.

40kb sounds about right.

Ok, I'll change it to 40Kb.

Here is a new update:

Placing bids works and optimal bid is determined (highest bid to win from 2nd highest). The advertiser can see all of his/her bids, but not if he/she is the highest (or the other bids on the same site). The publisher doesn't know anything about the bids on his site yet. This is something that I still have to work on.

This morning I worked on a AJAX script to load the data for the publisher and to put on his site. Because I have 0 experience with JavaScript/AJAX I'm already happy to have something that works like I want. This script is very static, so also here a lot of room for improvement.

How close are you to a proof-of-concept.

A proof-of-concept should not be far away any more. Just to show in a test environment.
I need however to make one script to allow bidding on the test sites that are entered while testing.
And some things will have to be deactivated, because they aren't functional yet.
I might even set up a test website with a functional ad box to show the results of the bidding.
I'll see if I can put something in place tomorrow, then we could do some testing after that.

Please note that the layout of the site is ugly, I've already been thinking about a better layout.

Update for now:

Bids are now viewable for the publisher on a detail page for the site that the ad is on. The owner
of the site has also the possibility to delete bids that he/she doesn't want on his/her site.
(Spend a lot of time to get some javascript code in shape to show the ad).

Didn't make it for the proof-of-concept. While setting it up I noticed that some things didn't work like I wanted.

Did today:
- Fixed an issue with session stealing cookies (publisher could hop over to the advertiser site and have access to some users account, although in a production setting both sites would run on different spots, so that would not happen, valuable lesson anyway).
- Hacked up a quick script to approve websites, so that they have setup everything correct before advertisers can bid on the site.
- And (this took me long) Ajax doesn't allow cross-site scripting, doh. So I looked at how project wonderful handles this, and now I have something that works between different sites. Just needs to make it a bit more flexible (now it just dumps a static file).

I'll shift the proof-of-concept a few days back (over the weekend?).

Did some minor fixes/improvements yesterday evening (you can't bid with the same ad on the same site again and ads respect the ad_type of the site now when placing bids).

I have now everything in place for a test run today, PM me if you are interested in a link to the test sites and a demo running on a other domain.

/me panics because he doesn't have a site to use it on.

No need for hurry. It will take a bit more time to go live. But my todo list is getting shorter.

What I did today:
- Redesigned overall layout of the site. Now I have more space to put things down and it looks better. ;)
- Details about bids on a site for people who did a bid on a site (site details and see what other bids are placed on that site). Still needs to be made a bit nicer.
- Deleting a bid is now possible for advertisers.

Update:

- CSS Fixes that didn't show up in my FF3.5, but that I later saw in FF4.0b and IE8.0.
- Keywords for publishers are now in. First 5 keywords per site are free, after that 1btc per month per keyword (if you put a keyword in halfway the month, it counts the remaining days and calculates the amount for the remaining days for that month).
- Website detail page for publisher cleaned up a little so it looks better.

Not much of an update this time.

I'll be heading to my parents for Christmas this afternoon, so don't expect to be happening much next few days.
The thing that needs to be done now is the financial accounting for both the publishers and advertisers within the site.
I've run some tests yesterday on my test system and I was slightly disappointed with the speed:

System at 535MHz takes about 128 seconds for 15000 updates to the database.
System at 1.20GHz takes about 74 seconds for 15000 updates to the database.

(Project wonderful has about 7600 sites that it hosts ads for, so the 15000 updates is I think a sane value for a PW size of site.)

Memory doesn't seem to be an issue (taking up only ~15 - 20 MB during the updates for the whole process).
Disc IO was not a bottleneck in this test, but might become a problem on a live system.

The database that I will be using will also be doing other queries and is larger than this test database,
so actual updating of the accounting fields will be slower. On the other side, the host running the site will
be much faster than the 1.20Ghz and I will be able to implement some tricks to make things faster and less
stressful for the database.

I'm also working on a publisher / advertising system backed by bitcoin.

Is the requirement for the bounty for it to be opensourced?

I don't think so, as noagendamarket never objects.

You will have to ask noagendamarket how the bounty awarding process work when there's competition.

Perhaps instead of jumping into development half cocked people should actually be sure what the aim of the bounty is . While I dont have a problem with projects being closed source - see mt gox et al , I prefer open source as the developer cant hold the community hostage through abandoning the project and/or inserting malicious code that harms people using it or leaving us hostage to the whims of one person. Im not a developer so I cant examine code to ensure it is doing what it claims. I need to rely instead on the members of this community who I know and trust will ensure nothing bad gets through and who can oversee and improve the product.

As such if this clearing house isnt the same open source license as bitcoin it wont qualify. The whole bitcoin community should benefit from this not just one person.  :)

Im not paying an open source bounty for closed source code.  I may as well give money to project wonderful if that's the case.


The one who has workable code on github (and verified to be acceptable) for a bitcoin project wonderful combo will claim the bounty.

Fair... (although "the same open source license as bitcoin" might not be ideal, AGPL might be better suited for web-based service code).

However... I won't be open sourcing any code before having it up and running and people using the service consider it as something they trust using. Releasing the code too early might cause other people jump on it and set up "half-backed ad services" based on the code (quick and easy money), causing users to be unsatisfied by the service (slow servers, (introduced) bugs, suddenly disappearing ad services, etc). This would not be good for the bitcoin community. I spend some considerable time and effort in it, so I also want to finish it in a controlled situation.

<edit>
Update:
A small change in the algorithm of the updates to the database had a huge impact:
System at 1.20GHz takes about 24 seconds for 30000 updates to the database. (Less than half the time for 2 times as much updates!!!)

I've been coding a part that I call "Jeeves". He will be the one that will be doing the updates (cleans up old and expired bids, takes care
of the payments and sends the money to the publishers). Jeeves will be running as a daemon (initially as a cron job).
</edit>

Whats wrong with the license bitcoin uses? It seems to be working well so far.   :P

By installing the code you're not distributing it, but only using it. This causes the copyleft provisions not to be triggered.
But on the other side, MIT (that bitcoin uses) isn't subjected to copyleft also.

If you want to keep changes and extensions (derived work) to the released code also open, you don't want to go with MIT.

And of course, saying this will trigger the whole GPL vs BSD discussion again.

Progress report?

Sorry for the slow reply. I've been at the parents-in-law for new year.

Mainly a lot of coding on the background, some refactoring, and expansion of the ad delivery code. Have been doing some testing of the current system (internal payment and switching of ads when one finishes its bitcoins), but some of the new code still has to be tested. Some loose ends still have to be tied together.

Progress report?

Some small bug fixes and a news section for the front page. I'm in the process of getting enough bitcoins to get this running somewhere for quite some time. MtGox and Bitcoin-central are helping me with getting enough bitcoins (yay for Euro transfers), but it is getting relative expensive.

The bitcoin is for getting a hosting service?

Yes, then I don't have to transfer the bitcoins that the clearing house earns to some other currency to keep it going. Plus it supports the bitcoin community economy.

Are you close enough to get all the bitcoin you needed to launch the site?

I've placed an order at bitcoin central (200 BTC @ 0.2450 EUR) yesterday, that would give me enough btc to get started (and have a bit of buffer). I was also waiting for some answers from the hoster about their service, but that's ok now.

If the bid does not get filled by Friday, I'll place an order for the service in the weekend. If it does get filled I'll place the order for the service earlier. With a bit of luck I'll have everything running by the end of January.

The bitcoin central market for Euro move rather slow, though.  :(

Maybe you could ask noagendamarket for 200 BTC on the condition that it will be paid back once you buy enough bitcoin?

/me is impatient about using the new ads market to earn kiba some bitcoin

Yeah that's a problem atm. I also are short on time during the week, so if I would order it now (the 200 btc is extra buffer, in principal I have now enough to order the service) I wouldn't have time to set it up. I'm also a person who doesn't feel comfortable with borrowing something (this counts double for money).

Maybe you should spend your own money instead of pledging someons else's ?

Ive offered Biomike hosting on a vps but he declined.

Of course I can also do my part and raise the price on Bitcoin Central, giving more people incentives to sell there.

Just bought the bitcoins against a higher price.

Ok, ordered a VPS.

Update:

Small bugfixes.

I presume that the ads market is getting set up this weekend? Can't wait to begin using it to earn bitcoin. :D

I'm afraid that that is a bit too soon. Currently setting up all the needed software, but I have to go to work today (bacteria don't stop growing over the weekend ;) ). There are also still some small things that need to be sorted out (last pieces of the payment code, etc., very important!).

I'll do my best to get it running this weekend, but no guarantees.

Most part is running now (still testing), but having problems handling the payments properly. So, not today unfortunately .

I hoped to announce it this evening, but encountered some bugs that I wanted to have fixed (and I had some time taken up by something else).
It's getting late here again (and last few days have also been late), so I move the announcement to tomorrow (I want to be online for some time after I announce it). Unless more problems show up.

Ok, here goes:

http://www.operationfabulous.com/

<edit>
Please note that ad blockers might influence your experience.
</edit>

Oh yeah, I am on before all of you! http://wiki.kibabase.com/Main_Page

Fixed some small visual bugs yesterday. In some cases more than 2 decimals would be displayed and from the bidding/website details people can now click the url of the website to see the website.

We have now one site that seems to generate quite some views (roughly 1 unique ip/3 minutes, currently I put down an ad there to point to the bitcoin website). With so many views I might want to start implementing stats soon I guess...

BioMike, what are the units of a bid? BTC/hr viewed?

When does viewing time stop counting? I don't want to pay if someone leaves it up all night. I would think a low maximum counting view time per person would be reasonable. Obviously 100 people seeing it for 5 minutes each is way better than 10 people seeing it for an hour each or one person leaving it up for 24 hours. Do you have some way of verifying that the ad is visible on the screen? Sometimes I open a page in a new tab and never see it because my browser crashes or I go to bed before I get around to it (I realize that I probably browse oddly). But that ad that I never see could get 12 hours of credit or more.

Anyway, even if all of that is done 'improperly' I can still bid like .0001BTC/hr right? And if I get enough traffic from it I don't care if I'm paying for a few overnighters.

"This website requires a minimum bid of 0.10000000149012"

I guess that should be 0.1? But why that limit? 4 cents an hour for views that might be sitting minimized seems high to me.

The 5% fee is very reasonable, but I think it would be better to charge only if a match is made between a site and an advertiser. Also I don't see how to get my remaining money back if I've changed my mind or can't win a bid.

Small things. "Unsufficient funds" should be "Insufficient funds". Also "size of bid" or "amount of bid" is more appropriate than "height of bid"

It works, I have an ad on Quezi. Will it tell me as my time is used up? Or disappear all at once?

The units are in btc/day.

Lets say you do a bid on a site for 2 btc/day, with a limit of 1btc.
This would mean that in 12 hours (assuming that you are the highest bidder and you actually pay the 2btc/day) you run through your limit and the bid will be deleted. If someone if bidding on the same page as well, but only 1btc/day , you only pay 1.1btc/per day (0.1 is the maximum value that is added, compared to the second highest bidder). In that case your ad will be placed longer, because it goes slower through your limit.

There is however one exception. Lets say you have multiple bids running and being displayed on sites, but the btc in your account is lower then the total of the limits in your bids, bids will be deleted when the funds of your account run dry, while the limit of your bids would not be reached yet.

The actual viewing is based on page loads. So the site loads, your ad is fetched and displayed and stays there until it is reloaded (if your bid is still active it is displayed again, else the one of a new bid is displayed). In your example, the views would be 100, 10 and 1. You would like the 100 more than the 10 or 1, so later, when the stats are implemented, look for the highest views.

Depending on the linking to your site, this depends if the viewer is using javacript or the non-javascript way.
Javascript: ad always links to your site
Non-javascript: if someone clicks your ad, while an other bid got active it will go to the site of the current highest bidder. Not nice, but there is no way to get the url to the viewer if he isn't using javascript. But you don't pay for that anyway.
However from what I see now is that most people use the javascript interface.

The Operation Fabulous website is nice and fast. Clean, simple, and easy to navigate. But the form fields need better descriptions.

On the "Add a website" page, what are the units for "Minimum bid"? Bitcoins per day? It needs to say this on the form. And I can't find a way to change the value of the minimum bid after a website has been added.

If I want to have more than one ad on the same website, do I need to add the same website more than once? What if the multiple ads are the same size, can the system cope with that?

I'm a publisher and I also want to be an advertiser, but I can't find a way to get from one part of the website to the other. This can be easily solved by making the logo clickable so that it's easy to return to the home page.

The 5% commission is mentioned on the Publisher FAQ, and also mentioned when you add funds as an Advertiser. So is it applied before the bid amounts, or after the bid amounts, or both? I actually think it's quite reasonable to take more than 5%. The service needs to be profitable for the owners, so that it can continue to be developed and promoted.

In my publisher account I see this:


...and the ad is showing correctly on my site. But this raises a couple of issues.

Doing financial calculations using floating point math always leads to problems. Sure, you can hide it by rounding to 2 places, but then you get anomalies like "I placed a bid for 0.1 bitcoins but it says my bid isn't enough, even though the minimum bid is 0.1 bitcoins" (because the minimum bid is being stored as something like 0.999999997 bitcoins). There are good decimal math packages for PHP already installed on most webhosts, if you're using PHP.

Also, what does that message actually mean? Does it mean that someone is bidding a maximum of 1.45 BTC (per day?) to advertise on my site, but because no-one else has bid, they are paying 0.1 BTC (per day?) which is my minimum. But the Operation Fabulous website says that when there is no competing bid, the advertising is free. So why does my publisher account show a balance of 0.5 BTC?

As an advertiser, if I click "Add a Bid" and select a site, I get to the Stage 2 form. Here it asks me to select an advertisement. But if I don't have any ads set up yet, it should say something like "You need to set up an advertisement before you can place a bid". It also asks for the "Height" and "Limit" of the bid, but it's not clear what these terms mean and how these amounts work.

Sorry to have so many questions, but I hope to become a heavy user as both publisher and advertiser.

Oh that's much better and different than what I thought!

I thought it was Joe sees it for 3 minutes + Jim for 4 + Tony 2 + 1 + 2+3+2+4+174 = done

I get it now, you are renting the whole thing regardless of hits the site gets.  

It is not really good for anyone for the ad to send to the wrong place after expiry, but I do see the problem.

This is really exciting and a great thing for bitcoin and bitcoin sites.

I don't like being forced through mybitcoin when I'm going to pay myself anyhow. They make me do a captcha, at least it's an easy one, but still it's like 3 extra clicks. It's a good option, but I don't think it's hard to assign a deposit address to an account, that would take me 0 clicks on your page, well one for copy, but no link to follow.

I see you answered part of my question while I was composing my previous post. But...


So this means the accounting is done hourly? That's good.

If my understanding is correct, the terms have these meanings:

"Bid": The maximum amount you are willing to pay per day, to run your ad on this site.
"Limit": The maximum total amount you are willing to pay for this "mini-campaign" for your ad on this site.

Perhaps that wording, or something like it, can be added to the website.

And from the Publisher side of things, I guess the term has this meaning:

"Minimum bid": The minimum amount you will accept per day for someone to run their ad in this space on your website, except that ads run for free if there is only one advertiser.

Finally, a feature request. I need a way to specify "no animated ads" to run on my sites. I want static graphics only.

Thanks!

It will disappear, notification might be implemented later.


Yes, many small bugs (the minimum bid warning, it's an rounding issue as things are stored as floats inherent to binary systems). I'm not a native English speaker. Thanks for the feedback.

I left transferring back out, because I thought people want to use it all to advertise (bid on other sites of they didn't win on one).
The paying fee over a "match" would be more difficult to implement reliably. This would also drain income considerably, as it is limited only to the amount of sites and not the users of the site.

It was easier to implement than doing the whole transactions tracking myself. I also don't like captchas. I plan to include other payment processors later.

I'll try the other questions later, I have to go now (work).

Please keep in mind that this site is FAR from finished.

Okay, it would be nice to know how much is really left in my balance if I were to cancel all my bids.


You do well, but I could tell. I'm happy to help.


Surely most people will use it all. But what if my site closes? Or I desperately need the money back? If coins are going to be unrecoverable this needs to be very clear as most sites let you hold a balance that you can get back. Also, you should want people to keep large amounts on the site so they don't cut it too close and run out. But if I cannot recover the money I will put it on only as I need it even though it is a little more work. If I get busy I may forget and now the sites make a little less because they serve the next lower bid.


I might not understand, but why not just take the cut from the site doing the advertising as it is paid to them? Whenever the command "Pay Quezi 1BTC" is issued make it instead "Pay Quezi .95BTC".

Ah, I don't mean take a one time fee. Still take a %, but only a % of money actually used for advertising. I think I was unclear before.

I found another bug.

When I clicked "delete ad" it did not delete the corresponding ad, but the other one.

I don't mean to swamp you. I hope it is helpful to have all this at once.

When I am logged in and type operationfabulous.com into my browser it takes me to the front page and I appear not to be logged in, but there is no "Log in" option. So I click "Start advertising with bitcoins" and now I am click "Register" and then I see that I am logged in, but I am still offered registration.

I think since it clearly still has me logged in, the home page should be told to greet me and give me a clear way into the page with all the options. If I want to register a new account it should let me, but log me out first.

Ok, the bug about deleting the ads should be fixed now (there was another bug in the same code, fixed that as well, but shouldn't
have caused any problems for users).

About the payment, I think I might have found an easy way to to charge only active bids (the ones that display on websites).
Currently the fee is on 2 sides, when people add the btc to their account and when the payout of the publisher takes place.
Both are 5% fee. What I could do is move the fee of the advertiser to the payment of active bids.

About the 2 account system and the links on the main page for the account menu:
First, when you're logged in (as advertiser or publisher), click on the "Publisher" or "Advertiser" menu entry besides "Home". This brings you immediately to requested site. I can't put this on the main page, because there are different accounts for publishers and advertisers.
There are a few reasons for this:
1) The Publisher site is much more "simple", they only need to setup their website, whereas Advertisers have many more screens and options. I think that there will be more publishers then advertisers and don't exposing them the features they aren't planning to use is IMHO a pre.
2) Splitting the accounts gives some better security and is something that helps later when the site grows and I need to scale up.
3) Automatic payout for publishers would not be possible. ;)


It's even better. It is accounted per minute ;)


Yeah, this was already on my todo list, but not high priority atm.

I will try to make some of the suggested improvements on the site this evening. I will also be in the #bitcoin-dev chat room.

Ok, I've made some updates yesterday evening (mainly that forms have a bit more information).
I also changed the handling of the advertiser fees in the way as suggested above.
2 things:
- Advertisers have been compensated with 2 x the fee they paid for their transfer(s) and has been added to their account.
- The fee is now subtracted from the account funds of the advertiser that won a bid , for the duration of the bid, but not from the limit. This means that your account funds need to be more than the limit of your bid. (Bid will get deleted when account funds run dry).

If I were a publisher I would be concerned that nasty porn or viruses or even just sites I hated would win and i would display them unknowingly for hours. Do you plan to implement a screening process?

I really like how it is now where I can update and ad or turn it on or off instantly. I'm just looking ahead to when people will inevitably have issues. I think you don't want to be the advertising site that put horse porn on MtGox for 2 hours :)

As a Publisher you have the possibility remove a bid from the list on your site. Viruses should in principle not be possible (as long as a browser handles images safely), because only JPEG, GIF and PNG files are allowed. Although an ad could link to a site that has malware, there is nothing I can do about that.
Including a screening process would be possible, but that would mean that while a winning ad is not approved by you for your site, your site would display nothing or a placeholder. You would not get paid in that case.
Like the "no animated ad" option, I could also add a "no xxx ad" option. But Advertisers that don't check the ad as "Animated" or "XXX" would still be able to advertise on your site.

Yes, I meant it could direct people to a malicious site through the ad.

That is always possible (even if content on a valid site changes after the ad is placed (e.g. a site defacement or through other (flash?) advertising on the site it links)). There is little I can do about that. If the malicious content is on purpose I can currently only remove the bid, ad, link or account of the advertiser in question and contact him/her through the email address (if that is valid).

Most browsers however check these days if the URL is reported for containing malicious content and refuse to load the site if that's the case.

That makes sense, I guess it isn't something that can be perfectly policed. It's probably best to address problems if/when they arise than to implement annoying procedures before they are necessary.

I've posted a new topic with poll to see what features are most popular to implement first.

Please keep other discussion in this topic.

A more workable option might be "No unapproved ads", so that an ad doesn't go live unless the publisher has explicitly approved it.

Yes, I think in general a publisher ought have control of which bid is taken, it shouldn't automatically be the highest.

If two bids are close then a publisher will probably prefer the more attractive ad, or the more interesting site. This will give ad makers incentive to not have ugly ads. And if crappy sites have to pay a more to get accepted I don't think that is a bad thing.

Of course you can make the default to take the highest, but give the publisher override power.

Eventually it might be good to have a message system, so you can say "Hey, I only turned down your bid because the color clashes really badly with my buttons" or "Sorry, I find your site disgusting."

On the issue of suspect links.

Someone could make a site that pays people for each link they verify . You can do this using amazon mechanical turk but why do that when someone could create a bitcoin income ?

Foir instance if you pull in an rss feed from google news and post out 5-6 links per day by twitterfeed it would be nice if you could send them to a service where people could verify they arent warez sites /porn or spam.

I think people would pay for such a thing.

@noagendamarket, yes, but I think it should be a project on its own. You also want to have multiple people to validate a site and pay the people who are the most having the same answer (like 100 people, 95 say it is a spam site, 5 say its not, then pay the 95 people 0.01 btc each.
Detecting malicious content will be difficult however, knowing about the situation that many people have it running on their computer without knowing it.


I think the Approvable ads might be a good thing. However, how would such thing be implemented? Per website that contains the ad (allows publishers to have sites that need approval and some that don't) or per publisher (all sites of that publisher need approval).
Also, when I would implement such feature I think it's better to store the bid in an "to-be-approved" list and only add them to the bidding list until after approval, else the algorithm to determine the highest bidder and the price for the ad would get overly complicated and/or slow.

Approvable ads represent a lot of development work, and would add some complexity to the interface.

As an intermediate measure, there could be a facility to reject an ad that is already running. Perhaps with two options: "Reject this ad from this website" and "Reject this ad from all my websites".

Will there be statistics for me to look at?

I was thinking about a blacklist when the bid gets deleted (would be only for that website). One other thing I was thinking about is a sort of "pre-emptive" approval of ads. A list with all ads, that you can say if you like or not for your sites. When an advertiser does a bit and you already approved it the bid will be taken up in the bidding, else it will be held for approval.


Not implemented yet. Seems people find the approval of ads more important, but I might do stats in between (because the approval is more or less in the poll (animated/xxx option) and stats are not (forgot to include them)). I can tell you that your site draws not so many people (only after you posted it there was a little spike) based on looking at the webserver logs.

Yes, pre-emptive approval (or disapproval) would be great.

As for stats, advertisers are going to want them so that they can set their bids. But it's not urgent.

BioMike, did something change? New adds have broken links. Even when I use the exact same link as a currently working ad it does not work.

edit: seems to work, maybe I didn't use the exact same address as before. Is the http:// necessary?

I'll have a look what happened here (after dinner). No idea though. The protocol (http://) is required for proper function, but there should be a check for that when it is entered.

[edit]
Fixed!
[/edit]

Is there a particular reason for 40kb as the size limit? I have a fairly normal skyscraper that I can't get under 42kb even as a jpg.

People suggested earlier that that was a reasonable maximum size for an ad. I'll raise the maximum size limit. Give me a few minutes.

[edit]
Maximum size should now be 100Kb. Could you give it a try?
[/edit]

Site owners don't want the loading of their pages to be slowed down. Page load speed is even one of the factors in a website's position on Google.

But sure, why not increase the limit for the skyscraper ad to 50kB or 60kB in return for reducing it for the smaller ads.

There are 2 checks for the size. One within the HTML code, that the browser should respect (most of them do) and one server-side.
The server side I could implement that way, but the HTML one not (I don't know what type of ad someone is going to upload before they do).
Or everything would have to be spread over multiple pages (like with placing a bid, I don't think anybody would like that).

[edit]
With the approving-of-ads-feature, this problem should also be solved.
[/edit]

[edit2]
BTW, stats are available for advertisers, so they can judge better how much they want to bid on a site.
[/edit2]

I can't see my own website statistics!

"stats are available for advertisers", not publishers. The publisher website detail page needs a redesign to make some room to put it in.
If you want I can PM the current stats to you.

Just register as an advertiser and take a look. A site owner should become familiar with how their site is presented to advertisers.

You should have a link to the bid page under every banner so that people knows that you can buy ads using bitcoin like what projectwonderful do with their ads.

I have this when no bid is placed on an ad space (see http://bitcoinreport.blogspot.com/ and http://www.infinitypfm.org/ as an example).
I might want to add a link later, but it is not a priority atm (need to make the bid page public available for that as well).

I'd give a lot more biz if these sites didn't have ridic mins... 1btc/day for a site with 10 hits? I lol'd.

Yes, I can't agree more. Now they don't make anything, else they would maybe make a few cents a day. Not much, but still more then nothing. Also check the location of the ad within the site. Putting it completely at the bottom will also generate less. I'll put a "hint" on the site later today.

People can always PM me if they want to have something changed, that will also be easier then re-setting up the site (which also needs to go through approval).

There are now about 8 to 10 advertisers registered, but only 3 or 4 have bids running. I wonder why the other advertisers don't bid.

Whats the min cashout?

5 BTC.

Cheers Kiba

I'm sponsoring this project as best as I can by preemptively signing up and placing an on my service (http://dylanw.dyndns.tv:8331/lvbx/). Is there any place I could send a few Bitcoins to help it along?

I think the best way to help is participating (especially advertisers). There are quite some sites now (most have now reasonable minimum bids), but the amount of active advertisers could be a bit higher. If you want to help, but you don't have anything to advertise, take a foss project that you like (hint: bitcoin, there have been ad runs for that before) and place an ad about that.

If that's to much "work". I could open an address where people can donate to, to advertise bitcoin, or something else. In that case you could also help with providing nice graphics for ads.

<edit>
Donations can be send to: 13udpXVNV1R2uSBAvpnUosJ1NLxGgmN57W
I will use those btc partially to promote Bitcoin on non-Bitcoin centric sites and partially for the rent of the server (although with current bitcoin price we're covered until the next year, so most will go to promoting Bitcoin).
</edit>

@Quip, I'll activate your ad later today (have to go to work first). Also, a good way to help is get a lot of visitors.

even .1/day for a site than get 8 hits a day is hardly "reasonable".

If people would just set minimums to 0 and let the market decide, you would see more business.

I already did. :)

I uploaded an Ad and it did not appear in the Ads list. Once you get that fixed and I get some more Bitcoins, I'd be happy to buy an Ad or two. Also, thanks in advance for activating my site.

Your site is activated now. About the ads in the ads list, disable any ad blockers. I didn't see anything unusual in the logs or database, so my guess is it is that.


True, I see people slowly dropping the minimum bid to 0.

Thanks for that. I did in fact have Adblock turned on, silly me. How did your site get in the block lists do quickly? XD

I also purchased one small add, as I am trying not to spend the BitCoins I have for sale (http://dylanw.dyndns.tv:8331/lvbx/).

How large is the network right now?

last I checked about 2 dozen sites and not quite that many buyers

Adblock looks for common used words on parts of sites and if it contains things like "ads" or "advertisement" it blocks it by default.
There is nothing I can do about that. Project Wonderful must have the same problems with this (they warn about it when entering their site, I might get something similar in place later, although many people who use ad blockers also have noscript (javascript is used to detect if the user is running adblock) and then it doesn't work any more.


Yes, about 10 - 15 sites (most of them getting 10-40 views per day), and only about 4 active advertisers.
1 site manages to get ~2200 views/day (in the weekends a bit less), current advertiser pays 0.26btc/day to have their ad displayed.

I've been tracking income over the past 2 weeks, there were no payouts (5% fee, based on 5 btc this is 0.25btc/payout), this gave about 0.15btc/week. The ad on the front page of the site has generated about 3 btc until now. It's not much, but I'm happy with the results so far.

BTW, I see that someone tried to do an SQL injection... which failed. ;)

The first payout (4.75 BTC) happened today.

Great to know you got it. Happy spending of it.

I registered an account on Operation Fabulous, but couldn't figure out how to bid on ads.  Do I need to design an ad first?  Fund my account first?

Haha, those are always funny. I remember xkcd.com did a color survey, where you had to name the color that was displayed. There were a lot of colors with mysql injections as the name. :D

Edit:
Pretty funny: http://xkcd.com/327/

You have to design an ad first, so that you can select it when you set up your campaign. If you don't have an ad (of the correct dimensions for the site that you're advertising on), the screen that you see is quite misleading. It should say "you can't advertise on this site until you have created an ad of xxx by yyy pixels".

PS: Please don't advertise on Quezi.com, whose readers are not your target market.

I hope to fix that with the upcoming big update (hopefully within a few weeks). The text above the site selection screen (part one of creating a bid) says the same (but I guess people don't read that).